There are flashes of bitter brilliance in this mobster picture from Ukrainian writer-director Oleg Sentsov, whose anti-Putin activism earned him a prison sentence from 2015 to 2019 – only ending after interventions from Amnesty International and the European parliament awarded him the Sakharov prize for human rights.
This is strong, fluent, sometimes impassioned film-making, but just as its troubled gangster antihero yearns for meaning in his life beyond violence, so this film appears to be straining for the same thing.
Rhino is the name of a huge, slab-faced tough guy, played by newcomer Serhii Filimonov, who grows up in late 80s Ukraine, with a mother, a brother and a sister and a drunk dad away in prison. An altercation with the wiseguys who run a local gym means Rhino has to join a rival gang for protection; they shape his natural aptitude for intimidation and violence. But he breaks away to set up his own firm and his fanatical dedication to the brutal vocation of crime, and his almost superhuman resistance to pain, bring him success – at a terrible human price.
The movie begins with a bravura, seamless sequence showing Rhino’s grim upbringing, in which he is first a very little kid, then a teen, then the formidable grownup man. After this dazzling piece of choreography, though, the film establishes a more regular, heavy tread of violence, its scenes and set pieces generically familiar. There is one superb piece of ellipsis and misdirection when Rhino is hiding out in Germany and a former mob comrade Plus (Yevhen Grygoriev) comes to him with a job offer; Rhino agrees, but asks if they can first go to the forest where he has to dig something up.
Rhino is narrating the film in flashback to an impassive guy with whom he now works in the debt-collecting business; I was hoping he would be a more complex, interesting or unexpected confessor figure. Even so, this is a stylish and muscular movie.
• Rhino is available on 16 May on digital platforms.
